Read William W. Johnstone Online
Authors: Massacre Mountain
Tags: #Murder, #Western Stories, #Wyoming, #Westerns, #Fiction, #Sheriffs - Wyoming, #General, #Mountain Life
William W. Johnstone (6 page)
C
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E
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HAPTER
E
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I woke up sick as a puking cat. I didn’t know what time it was. The sun tossed light into Belle’s boardinghouse. My body smelled. My mouth was fuzzy and dry. I was fevered. I don’t know how I got so sick, but what did it matter. I’d rubbed shoulders with a lot of people at the opera house, and maybe the sickness rubbed off on me.
I didn’t want to get up but there was stuff to do. I had some crimes to solve, including a murder of someone unknown. I started to get up, and fell back. Getting up was a bad idea. I didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t been drinking and wasn’t hung over. I got to testing each part of myself. My head hurt, tongue was fuzzy, neck and shoulders hurt, but lungs pumped away all right. My gut was nauseous, my bowels threatened disaster, and my legs ached.
My most immediate task was to get down the stairs to the outhouse in back. Either that or face disaster. The way I was feeling, it was like climbing the highest peak in Wyoming. I didn’t have any choice, so I forced myself up, steadied myself against the dizzies, and managed to pull on some pants one leg at a time. Then I stumbled down the wooden stairs, got to the two-holer, used up half a Monkey Ward catalog cleaning up, and staggered through the yard back to the boardinghouse.
Belle spotted me and blocked my passage.
“You look like a throat-slit hog,” she said.
“Feel worse than that,” I said.
“You ain’t going to the office, are you?”
“I couldn’t get past the first block. Belle, I need you to go tell them I’m sick.”
“I’ll tell them, but first I’m going to get you back in your bunk and get some tea up there.”
“My ma used to say tea cures anything. All you got to do is down it. Send me some red-eye.”
Instead, she was pushing and shoving me, and with each step I felt a great force hauling me upward. It took some doing, but old Belle finally got me laid out like a slab of meat, and got some tea into me. Don’t ever drink tea. It’s the awfullest stuff and I think some mad genius invented it to torment the world.
“I’ll get Doc Harrison,” she said.
“No, don’t! I can’t afford it. And he’ll yank my tonsils out without asking.”
“I’ll get him anyway. And I’ll stop at your office and tell them you’re dying and need last rites.”
“You’re real kind, Belle.”
I sank lower into the corn-shuck mattress, which crackled under me. If I had to be sick, I might as well be plenty sick, so I sort of lay there turning lavender, staring at the fly-specked ceiling while snakes burrowed through my gut.
“Tell Rusty and De Graff to find out who the body is. Start with that man rooming with Mrs. Gildersleeve, who owns the show. Or just send one of my men over here, and I’ll tell them.”
“Whatever,” she said. She vanished, and appeared with a white enameled thunder mug.
“You lose anything from any north or south exit in your carcass, you lose it in here. If you lose it on the floor, it’ll drip through the planks and wreck my parlor. I’m expecting guests.”
“Gotcha, Belle,” I said.
I eased back in my bunk. The room was probably going to be my coffin. The ceiling would be the last thing I’d ever see. I might croak in the dark and never see sunlight again. Maybe croaking wouldn’t be such a bad idea, the way I felt. The room rotated around and around and then heaved like the deck of a ship in a gale.
I was dangerously near heaving, but it never happened. I’d hold off until Doc Harrison arrived, and then show him a thing or two. If he came. I hoped he wouldn’t. He would be full of hearty cheer, and I’d be ready to kill him if he said one more kindly word.
I lay there rumbling away, farting and belching, and then Rusty walked in without even knocking. They call him Rusty because of his copper hair; I don’t know what the rest of his name is; I’d have to look it up in the county ledgers. He’s my best deputy, and is real good at terrifying children. He’s got a lantern jaw and sings bawdy songs like a sailor on shore leave. He can keep order in Doubtful better than I can. His main fault is that he pinches women’s butts.
“How you doing?” he asked.
“I might croak.”
“That’s fine. The office runs better without you. Don’t get well.”
“I’ll try not to.”
“We all went to have a look at that corpse over at Maxwell’s. He sure is a stranger.”
“Yeah, no one in Upward’s joint ever saw him. You get aholt of the vaudeville lady?”
“Yeah, we got her into Maxwell’s just as he was bleeding the corpse into a bucket. She said it ain’t anyone with the show.”
“What about her consort? The one she showed up with?”
“Him? He came with her. That’s her fixer. Harry Frost. He does the fixing for the show.”
“What the hell is fixing?”
“Every show’s got a fixer. He’s the one makes things work. If someone quits, he pounds the hell out of the quitter or finds a replacement. If a freight company overcharges, he has it out with the company. If they lose costumes in a rainstorm, he fixes up the show with new ones. If the politicians in the next town want some bucks or free tickets or a concession to sell beer in the lobby, he gives them something. Get it?”
“I wish he’d fix my gut.”
“I don’t think the deceased had anything to do with the show. He looks like a businessman. Pretty well dressed.”
“Rusty, you get Arbenz to take some pictures of him. Prop him up, get the image, and have Arbenz make two prints. We need to get someone to identify him.”
“Maxwell wants money.”
“My ma always told me never walk into a funeral parlor. Rusty, when I cash in, which should be in ten minutes or so, you put me in a wagon and take me to the supervisors and lay me across their big table in there and tell them to pay.”
“They’re too cheap, Cotton.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
“You need a good scrub. Should I get Belle?”
“Stop torturing me, Rusty.”
“You should never have took your boots off. How can you stand your own feet?”
“My ma used to say that smelly feet are better than any other smells.”
“I’m out of here.”
Rusty left, and I settled back to get some rest, but then Doc Harrison busted in unannounced. He was unlikeable on sight, with them little eyeglasses with round lenses and shark teeth wounding his dusty lips.
“Belle sent me,” he said.
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” I said.
He sat on the edge of my bed, poking me with a finger and making me mad.
“And I won’t pay you since I didn’t ask for you,” I said.
He was manipulating my jaw, trying to find swelling in there, and listening to my heart and all that stuff.
Finally he quit mauling me. “You’re right. There’s nothing wrong with you.”
“I told you so.”
“It’s the vapors.”
“What’s that?”
“The vapors are the imitation of disease. The county supervisors are firing you, so you get the vapors.”
“Tell that to my chamber pot,” I said.
“The vapors are induced by stress. They are most common among women but an occasional womanish male gets them.”
“I haven’t got any vapors.”
“That’s three dollars. I usually charge two, but you’re special.”
“Send it to the county supervisors. I didn’t ask you to come.”
“Belle thought you were goldbricking. She thought you should be out on the street keeping us safe. You discovered a body last night and now you have the vapors.”
“Doc, I’m going to sleep,” I said, and turned my back on him.
“You should get out of bed and stop cheating the taxpayers,” he said.
He stuffed his shiny instruments into his black Gladstone and eased out the door. He was a pretty good doc, except when he wanted to be.
He made me mad. I wondered what the next insult walking through my door would be. I pushed myself out of my deathbed and uncovered the chamber pot, and sat, getting settled just in time. That was just about as satisfying as a chamber pot session can be, and I was congratulating myself when Mrs. Gildersleeve and Harry Frost walked in.
“Take your time, Sheriff,” she said, and settled on my bed, waiting for me to finish up.
That’s show people for you. They are a breed apart.
This was getting to be a predicament, so I just sat tight and hoped the smell would drive them out. But they just sat there.
“What do you want?” I asked, refusing to budge an inch.
“Death threats,” said Frost.
“Not a bad idea,” I said.
He dug into his suit coat and pulled out several papers and handed them to me.
I don’t read real good, but I got the gist of them. They were saying to get out of town before sundown or the Gildersleeve Variety Company would soon be shorthanded.
“What are you going to do about it?” Frost said.
“Where’d these come from?”
“They got pushed under the door of our hotel room. Ralston found one pushed under the door of the opera house. And another ended up with the ladies of our cast.”
“Who doesn’t want you here?” I asked, still not budging. The smell was getting real ripe now, so I figured they’d be escaping in a minute or two.
“Ralston thinks the banker and his friends are behind it.”
“Sanders? That’s possible. He wanted me to arrest your whole show even before it opened.”
I looked at the notes. They were printed in block letters even I could read. Not that script stuff.
“Maybe you should write one of your own and stick it under the bank door,” I said. “You don’t need the law for this.”
“Sheriff, these are death threats. ‘Get out or end up shorthanded.’” Frost said.
“This is just some Doubtful prank or other,” I said.
“You should get off the pot and help us,” Mrs. Gildersleeve said. “Mr. Ralston said you’d help us, and what have we got? A sheriff stuck on a pot.”
I sighed, and reached for the Sears Roebuck catalog lying there, brought by Belle along with the chamber pot.
“I’m off the pot,” I said. “I’ll go talk to Sanders. If he did it I’ll deal with him.”
I ripped a page of farm implements from the Sears catalog and stood.
“God almighty,” Frost said. “You’ve sprung a leak.” He steered Mrs. Gildersleeve through my door and into the hall while I repaired myself. I didn’t much feel like getting up and confronting Sanders, but if my vapors allowed it, I’d go over there.
It took a long time to get myself repaired. And I forgot to cover the pot, so the room wasn’t improving. But I finally got dressed, and sat down to study them death notices they handed me. They was all hand-printed with a pencil. Someone sure didn’t like the variety company.
They all were signed, in small type at the bottom: “Doubtful Mothers for Modesty.”
Well, there were two or three of those in town, probably all friends of Mrs. Sanders.
I stood, and got dizzy. If I had the vapors, they sure were plenty powerful vapors. Maybe I’d start with Hubert Sanders himself, since he was the one who wanted me to shut down the show even before it arrived. Or maybe Ralston first. I wanted to get the story. When did these death threats show up? And who did he think was doing it?
I carried the chamber pot down to the parlor where Belle was entertaining the Doubtful Chamber of Commerce, and handed it to her.
“Got it filled right up,” I said.
“Oh, crap,” she said, and accepted my gift.
I staggered into the daylight, en route to the opera house, hoping I’d survive the vapors. I made a mental note of all the outhouses in town as I headed for the opera house with the death threats in hand.
C
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Once I got out in the sunlight and the warmth of a summer’s day, I felt worse. Them vapors sure had me looser than a calf with scours. I hoped Doc Harrison would catch the vapors himself; serve him right.
I stood in front of Belle’s deciding whether I could walk or not. I decided I couldn’t but had to, so I began bobbing and weaving my way to the sheriff’s office, intending to startle my lazy deputies. Actually it was good to get some sweet air in my lungs. I was feeling pretty fit above the waist, but south of there I was still in trouble. The air in my room was just short of lethal.
I wobbled down Main Street and finally climbed the steps and into the office, where Rusty and Burtell had their feet on the desks while eating marshmallows. They eased their boots off the county furniture as I entered.
“You look like you’re seeing a ghost,” I said.
“You’re supposed to be dead,” Rusty said.
“My ma always said a gossip dies a thousand times before his death,” I said.
“We haven’t got anywhere with the murder,” Rusty said. “We were just thinking what to try next.”
“What have you done about it?”
“Talked to saloon men.”
I pulled the death notices from my pocket and handed them to the deputies. “You fellers got any idea about these? They got put under the doors of the variety company.”
Burtell eyed his upside down and handed it to Rusty. “My eyes are no good,” he said.
That wasn’t exactly right. I could read better than Burtell. He didn’t make it past fourth grade.
“It just says for them to git out of town or end up shorthanded,” Rusty said.
“That’s supposed to be a death threat?” Burtell asked. “Maybe it’s a threat to chop off some hands.”
Rusty rolled his eyes. I stepped outside into the sunlight for a moment, to pass some more gas. Someone told me that if you touched a match to that gas it’d blow up. I mean to try that some day. When I stepped back in, Rusty eyed me.
“You’re pretty pale,” he said.
“It’s the vapors.”
“You better go back to Belle’s.”
“I’ve got a murder to solve and death threats, and all you do is sit here eating marshmallows.”
“The supervisors were here looking for you. I think they were planning to fire you for being sick.”
“Well, if I’m fired I’m still going to solve this murder if I can.”
I abandoned them to their marshmallows and wandered toward the opera house. I had one more card to play. I found the door unlocked and Cyrus Ralston in his cubbyhole backstage, waxing his moustache. He had a small revolver on his desk and was ready to grab it when I wobbled in.
“Oh, it’s you, Sheriff. Doc Harrison says you have the vapors.”
“I’m fit as a fiddle,” I said.
He was amused.
“Ralston, we got an unidentified male over at Maxwell’s Funeral Home. He’s not local. He’s too well-dressed. No one in Doubtful dresses like that. None of the barkeeps had ever seen him. Maybe he’s with a show. I’m wondering if you’d mind having a look.”
“I enjoy bodies,” he said. He tucked the revolver into the breast pocket of his black worsted suit, and we headed out the door for Maxwell’s a block away.
“Your show doing well?” I asked, mostly to keep him from getting ahead of me.
“Sold out every night, Sheriff.”
“That cancan does it,” I said.
“That’s what’s causing the death threats.”
“How long will they be here?”
“Tomorrow night’s the last show. Then they’re off to Casper. I tell them there’s nothing good in Casper, and they’ll have to play in a root cellar or a church basement, but they’ll give it a try.”
We steered into Maxwell’s parlor. It was just a tiny place, on the theory that no one in Doubtful had any friends or family or money, but it was the only burial palace in town. It started as a log store with a false front, but now looked like a cottage, with green shutters on fake windows and whitewash covering all the bad carpentry.
Horatio Maxwell answered the door chime, and yawned. “Up half the night squeezing blood from that turnip,” he said.
Without my asking or nothing, he led us through a couple of parlors to a dark room in back, where the unknown lay on a zinc tabletop.
“Nothing in his pockets,” Maxwell said.
“That you’d admit to,” I added.
“No gold teeth,” he said.
“Except what’s in your pocket,” I said.
Meanwhile, Ralston studied the ghostly white body, which wore underdrawers and no more.
“Pinky Pearl,” he said. “Oh, no.”
“You know him?”
“Advance man for the next show. I spent yesterday afternoon with Pinky. Oh no, this is terrible.”
Now we were getting somewhere. “Who
is
this fella?”
is
this fella?”
“He’s with the next show, the Grand Luxemburg Follies, doing advance.”
“What’s that?”
“He works ahead, making sure the show has what it needs when it gets here. If a magician needs a live chicken to pull out of the hat, the advance man gets the chicken.”
“Now there’s some job for you,” Maxwell said.
“Advance men book rooms, book meals, book transportation, make deals with theater owners like me, fill special needs,” Ralston said.
“What did he want yesterday?”
“Actually, he wanted to know whether his company would be safe.”
“Safe?”
“The Follies are a little daring.”
“Well, the less safe the better,” Maxwell said, and I worked that comment around in my noggin a little and decided Maxwell was drumming up trade.
“We’ve got to notify next of kin.”
“The show will know,” Ralston said. “It’s leaving Cheyenne in the morning. Be here the following eve.”
“We’ve got a killer around here,” I said. “You got any clues, Ralston?”
“The deceased is a show man. So am I. That means I’m staying armed.”
“Who runs the Grand Luxemburg Follies?”
“The Camel Brothers Circuit.”
“What’s that?”
“There’s organizing outfits, some in New York, some in Chicago, that create circuits and put shows on them and hire or own shows themselves. My theater’s a Camel Brothers house.”
“Roll him over, Horatio.”
The undertaker flipped the carcass with a practiced hand.
The stab wound was low, below the rib cage.
“First stabbing I’ve dealt with,” I said. “Cowboys, teamsters, and vagrant males all use six-guns.”
“I’ve seen a few,” Maxwell said. “This killer knew enough to thrust upward from a low point.”
“A professional, then?”
Maxwell nodded. “We’ve an experienced killer loose in Doubtful. Who’ll he strike next?” He cleared his throat. “Now, Sheriff, about the fee—my little recompense?”
“Wait for the Grand Luxemburg Follies. They’ll take care of him, all right?”
“But it would be helpful if the county paid from its Poor Fund. You never know about show people, beg your pardon Mr. Ralston.”
“Bury Pinky Pearl and send me the bill. And give him a good send-off,” Ralston said. “I’ll tell his company when they roll in. Oh, and Maxwell—get a man of the cloth too, and some flowers if there are any, and something better than a pine box. And a marker on that grave.”
Horatio Maxwell scribbled away. “Ah, yes, a marker. We have a thousand-dollar granite obelisk, plus shipping from Vermont. Shall I sign you up? The incised legend would be extra, of course. We’d have to bring in an artisan from Denver. So far, you’re at two thousand seven hundred fortynine dollars.”
The theater owner sighed. “Pour a rectangle of cement, and put his name in it, and I’ll pay twenty dollars.”
“That’s seventy-nine for the concrete, and forty for the name in it, Mr. Ralston.”
Ralston inflated like a bladder. “Cancel that. Some of us will pick up the body in an hour.”
“And do what?” Maxwell asked.
“Bury Pinky Pearl,” Ralston said.
“I’ll get the deputies to pitch in. We’ve got a couple of spades,” I said.
“But you can’t! It’s not legal.”
“Ralston and I’ll pick up Pearl in one hour. Have him ready.”
“I won’t let him go until I’m reimbursed.”
“That killer stabbed the wrong man,” I said.
Ralston moved briskly. “I’ll go rent a dray, Sheriff, while you get the deputies.”
I didn’t expect to do much shoveling, not the way I felt, but I’d fetch two deputies with strong backs. Only trouble was, they weren’t in there. They’d been out to lunch for three or four hours. I did collect the spades, and by the time I got back to Maxwell’s, Ralston had one of Turk’s drays ready, and he also had four of the roustabouts bunking in Turk’s hayloft. We marched into Maxwell’s and found him back there with Pearl, who was wrapped in a winding sheet.
“Where’s a coffin?” Ralston said.
“I can’t release the deceased or supply goods or services without reimbursement.”
“Well, bill the county,” I said, easing past the dapper little mortician.
We eased Pearl into a box from a stack of boxes, and then carried him out to the dray, while Maxwell caterwauled behind us.
“I’m going to talk to the county supervisors about you,” he said.
“That’s fine. The line’s only a block long now,” I said.
The roustabouts laid Pearl’s box on the dray, and led the horse toward the Doubtful cemetery, which was just west of town. We were a sorry bunch, in sorry clothes except for Ralston, who always wore something that suited his station in life.
We pulled in there, just the six of us and that pine box, and we picked a good spot, next to Mrs. Stokes, the lawyer’s luckless lady. The roustabouts took over, carving the rectangle in the earth, prying loose a few rocks, and finally climbing out.
With a nod from Ralston, they eased Pinky Pearl into the hard soil of Doubtful, and then shoveled that tan clay back into the hole, until there was only a mound.
“I’ll say some words,” Ralston said.
We stood there in the summer afternoon.
“Some people don’t much care for show people. But Pinky Pearl was as fine a man as I’ve ever met. His handshake was his bond. Like all of us in the business. We try to brighten people’s lives, bring them the things that they never would see in their own worlds. We bring dreams to people. We bring them smiles and tears and beauty. We remind them that life is something to enjoy, no matter how hard it may be. Pinky Pearl was one of us. May he rest in peace. May God welcome him as one who spread happiness across the land, and brought beauty to those who had never known beauty.”
Ralston looked like he was going to say more, but then subsided, and stood with head bowed, perhaps offering his own silent prayer.
One of those roustabouts had found a wild aster, and now he placed it gently in the yellow clay, where it would serve as an honor and a blessing and a remembrance.
We took the horse and dray back to Turk’s, and I checked in at the sheriff office, and found no one around, and my deputies out to lunch until supper. I was pretty worn out, and far from well, so I settled in the swivel chair and dozed. There needed to be someone watching over Doubtful.
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